I love writing. I revere the use of language as an instrument for seeking the truth about life. My books are downloadable and the paperback editions will be appearing soon. Click on the links at the right side of this page. Peruse this blog, it's loaded with music, photography and writing. Hey, sign up for my email list!

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

Suicide And Robin Williams

Suicide. Robin Williams. You would think that those two items would not compute, that they
wouldn't add up. I can hear millions of
people talking: "the guy had everything", they say. "He was successful, famous, loved
around the world. What could be so
depressing that it would cause him to wrap a belt around his neck?"

I
counseled a Suicide Hotline for five years.
I burnt out. I couldn't take it
any more. My mother was a suicide; I
found her cold body laid sideways across her bed. I never thought that I would entertain suicidal thoughts, but I
was wrong. Only recently I had a two
month depression so intense that I did indeed creep up to the edge of that
precipice and look over the rim.

In
suicide counseling we were taught to look for particular red flags. The first indicator was whether the caller was having
thoughts or fantasies of suicide. Then we would ask if there was a plan, a mental blueprint of how the suicide would happen. If there was a detailed plan we were to probe for the acquisition of the instrument of self-murder. A gun, razor blades, pills....by means of
asking these questions we were trained to evaluate how seriously the caller was
flirting with suicide. If things were
bad enough it was time to trace the call and get the police involved.

A
prominent suicide like Robin Williams strikes us in a peculiarly vulnerable
place. If he can kill himself, we
think, then anyone is capable of suicide.

That
is the plain truth. I never thought
that I would encounter suicidal ideation, that I would entertain fantasies of
killing myself. Around the beginning of
June this year, a depression of overwhelming intensity seemed to leap on my
back like a leopard striking from the high branches of a tree. It's mostly over, now, I feel better, but I
will never again put myself beyond the reach of the bony hand of self-killing
despair. Whatever deadly instrument it
holds, I know that I have suicide within me.
My mother did it. I thought
about her a lot as I endured my mental and emotional pain.

Robin
Williams, Robin Williams. I loved Robin
Williams. I spent an evening in a club,
sitting next to him at the bar. We
talked about the band we had both come to hear. He was a compact little guy and as I was being entertained by our conversation I felt a weird familiarity but i didn't realize that he
was THE Robin Williams, comedian, actor, bicyclist, humanitarian and all around
conscious intelligent man. Then, just
as we were going our separate ways it hit me.
OH! That was Robin
Williams. Well I'll be damned! I didn't have to pretend not to recognize
him because I didn't until the encounter was over. Just as we were shaking hands and saying farewell a little voice
in my head said "Television Television" and I thought maybe he was in
a commercial or something and then, as I watched his retreating back exiting
the club I got my "AHA!" and I knew he was Robin Williams.

Having
Robin Williams hang himself with a belt hurts so hugely I can't even begin to
encompass its massive trauma. I can
only think, "That poor man! His family must be going through hell!" My brush with the heavy dark freezing
terrifying possibility of killing myself was enough to lift the blinders from
my eyes. Anyone in this world can find
themselves in enough trouble to seek the last, only, final way out. The problem is this....I know nothing about
the Afterlife. But I have an intuition
that suicide doesn't get you a free pass out of that trouble. It lands you in even worse trouble.

But that's only one
possibility. I imagine there are as
many afterlives as there are people and each one of them is unique. I hope desperately that Robin Williams
escaped from whatever it was that so tormented him. I can't begin to imagine. Due to Williams' drug history there's a widespread assumption that drugs were involved. Now we have late breaking news that he was recently diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease. That would push me towards the precipice. One of the hallmarks of depression is the phenomenon known as "catastrophizing". In my case I began fantasizing about my future; that I would end up lonely, sick and homeless. I would be a degraded dweller in cardboard boxes. THAT's catastrophizing. There's some deeper wound that exists in all of us, some Original Grief
that accompanies us into the physical world.
It rides along with us in our physical bodies and sometimes it just
waits there and does nothing but cause pain, momentary pain, endurable
pain. But sometimes that primal slash
starts to bleed and no matter who you are, you can't stop the bleeding, you
can't stanch the flow. Your psychic
energy begins to drain from you just like real blood and you get weaker and
weaker and you tell yourself, hang on, be a warrior, endure. You do NOT want to hear some fool tell you
"Get over it. The past is the
past, it's over and done with. It's
time to move on." You don't want
to hear that because the fool who says that is clueless, has no idea how deep
psychic pain can take you.

Just
pray, O Afflicted One, pray and reach out to your friends, the ones who
understand that no one is immune, no one gets a free pass, when the Darkness
descends. It can come at any time. We never know. If it's not on top of you right now, breathe a grateful sigh of
relief and thank the Gods that you are more or less normal. Enjoy that so-called Normal because
sometimes it's the best we can have. After feeling what I felt these last few months,
NOT feeling such things is pure bliss.

About Me

A Midwesterner by birth, I migrated to the West Coast just in time to be a hippie but discovered that I related better to the Beatniks. I harkened back to an "old school" world of hard bop, Coltrane, jazz, poetry, painting and photography. A large part of my life went "off the rails" and I experienced the reality of the streets for too long. Putting myself back together was the defining experience of my life so far. It wasn't easy. It did, however, nurture the writer in me. I have written novels, memoirs, poems, humorous fake emails, and commercials

for ridiculous non existent products. I have a passion for astronomy, history, psychology, the pure abstract absurdity of human experience (what the hell is it?). My partner is an honest to god Animal Communicator, as nutty as that may sound to some people. She is the real deal. She also suffers from Fibro and it's a curse with which we must work every day. Come visit my blog and